Germany has set a high bar for herself in the 21st century, leading the world away from the carbon-based economy of the 19th century and forgoing the fission power that seemed so promising in the 20th. Faced with the prospect of Putin using natural gas exports as a weapon, however, she has fallen back on some coal-fired capacity that might otherwise have been shut down. That's an exigency of history, not a failure of vision. The rest of the world--much of which has more solar and more wind potential than Germany--would do well to follow where she leads into the future.